10 Popular Design Tactics You Can Apply for Your Shopify Store

Design Tactics

Last updated - May 30, 2022

One of the best ways to increase sales for your business today is by building an eCommerce store on Shopify. This is because this platform keeps growing every day and is now present in 175 countries. It is worth considering for every business owner looking to expand their market and increase sales.

But then, building an eCommerce store on Shopify as a beginner can be a bit nerve-racking. This is because the platform only takes care of domains, hosting, front, and back-end functionalities. You have to handle the most vital and challenging bit of the work, mainly UX design.

Your approach to design determines how successful your store becomes. The biggest mistake many novices make is focusing on non-essential design tactics and overlooking the essential. This article provides you with the best design tips to ensure you concentrate on the things that matter.

Here is everything you need to know.

Choose the Right Theme for Your Business

The first and most important step for designing a Shopify store is choosing the right theme. The theme you choose will be the backbone of your website. It determines the overall appearance of your website and whether it will appeal to your target audience or not.

Several things can determine the theme you choose for your website. The first is the kind of experience that you want to create for your customers. Others include what your competitors are doing, how you want to display your products, and your web design budget.

According to research, web design determines up to 94% of first impressions. Therefore, it is an aspect of business that needs no gambling. Invest your time and money into choosing a perfect website theme to provide the desired first impressions.

Show Your Customers That Your eCommerce is Secure

Security is one of the biggest considerations people make when shopping online. Lack of trust is one of the major reasons many customers abandon their shopping carts when shopping online. As an eCommerce store owner, you need to convince your customers that your website is secure.

Design Tactics

Different website features can show your site is secure. They include certificates and trust seals placed in visible places within your website. For instance, there needs to be an SSL icon on your checkout page so that customers know that they can securely make payments.

Work With the Right Designer

The designer that you partner with can determine the success of your web design. This is because not everyone can design a website, and there’s no harm in hiring a professional. But then, you need to take your time to find the best web design solutions.

A good web designer should help your business rediscover its image. They should have enough expertise to help your business achieve its goals through web design. In the end, if they can build your website with a purpose, generating more revenue from it won’t be a problem.

Use Apps to Build Your Site

Another great web design tactic is using apps to build your website. WordPress provides its users with plugins that they can use to create their e-commerce store easily. Shopify allows its users to use different applications to make web building seamless and much more effortless.

With dozens of applications available, Shopify has put them into categories. Your choice of an app depends on the part of your website that you want to build. For instance, there are apps for product discovery, sales, and conversions, inventory management, customer support, etc.

Building your website with apps makes the process easier and saves time. Besides, it helps you create a better website and provide excellent UX.

Add Guest Checkouts

An essential step that’s worth concentrating on in the e-commerce process is checkout. It is the point at which a business completes a sale and makes profits. There are different best practices that companies need to keep in mind when thinking about making checkouts easy and efficient.

One factor that should come into mind is whether to choose a customer account or guest checkouts. Your type of business and whether customers return to your site often can help determine what’s best. Guest checkouts are the best if you do not record a high number of returning customers.

A business that uses guest checkouts makes first-time purchases easy. It also reduces cart abandonment rates and, in the end, makes more profits.

Make Sure Your Site Loads Quickly

Website speeds also determine how profitable a business becomes. You cannot make profits if your website takes too long to load. First, that will create a negative first impression for your business. Second, it will also make it difficult to rank on the first pages of search engines and benefit from organic searches.

Thus, you need to use different techniques that help reduce website loading time. The first thing to do is compressing images using various available online file compression tools. Avoiding third-party themes and removing non-essential widgets, apps, and plugins can also help.

Assess and Upgrade Customer Experiences

As a business owner, you always want to see your business at the top. But then, the online business environment is a little bit tricky. You can be at the top today and far behind tomorrow. Thus, you need to put in efforts to ensure that your business stays ahead of its competitors.

Things like website assessment are vital for a business that wants to thrive. Ensure that your website provides customers with the best user experiences always. Website assessment helps you check different aspects of SEO, how users engage with your site, your website’s appearance, and branding.

Website assessment helps you improve different aspects of your business. For instance, if the appearance of your website isn’t appealing enough, you can channel some money and time into improving it. This also applies to aspects like mobile accessibility, content quality, ease of use, etc.

Incorporate Visuals

Visuals are important for every eCommerce business. Visuals give your target customers a view of the products that you sell. They create the atmosphere for your online business and impact user experiences. Therefore, you need to ensure that you incorporate visuals in your website design strategy.

Design Tactics

Photos and videos help a business showcase its products online. The fact that you do not have a personal touch with your customers and cannot physically see the products makes visuals necessary. You should ensure that they are of good quality and show the products you sell in detail.

Make Product Discovery Easier

Making it easy for customers to find products they are looking for on your website should be a priority. The best thing about Shopify is that it allows its users to build a custom navigation. This means that you can easily organize products on your website into different categories and subcategories.

One important element that shouldn’t be missed when doing this is the search box. Not all your customers will have time to check through different categories. Search functionality helps you keep customers who would have otherwise clicked away from your website out of frustration.

Besides using search boxes, you can also consider product tags. These tags help customers find similar products without having to click back or search afresh. You can also include filters and make it easy to remove them to allow customers to decide how to search for products.

Add Elements to Connect with Leads

Another thing to keep in mind when setting up an online selling website is connecting with your audience. As a business owner, you need to ensure that your leads can easily link up with you. Thus, you should have the elements that make it easy to connect with audiences on your website.

Excellent examples of such elements are social media buttons. There is no question that social media offers us great opportunities to connect with audiences. When designing your website, ensure that there are easily accessible social media buttons for customers to click and follow your business. 

You should also not overlook an email sign-up bar. This is because email marketing is one of the most effective ways to sell your brand. An email database is essential, and that’s why you need a sign-up bar.

Key Takeaway

Building and running an e-commerce store on Shopify is not an easy task. You need to always ensure that your website design is perfect. Otherwise, edging out the huge number of competing businesses hosted on Shopify will be a daunting task.

You need to avoid over-optimizing your site and focus on the design tactics that add value. For instance, your website must have the right theme. You also should ensure that it loads quickly and uses elements like visuals correctly for a good user experience.

Now that you have a list of design tactics to keep in mind, it is time to build your Shopify e-commerce store. Keep in mind that your site doesn’t have to be as good as your competitor’s site on the first day. Keep the best practices and tips mentioned above in mind, and you will easily get your site to shape.

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